Zimmerman says he shot Martin in self-defense when he was attacked.
Lee’s act, which ended in the couple fleeing their home, is of a piece with the even more egregious act of the New Black Panthers, which offered a bounty for Zimmerman’s “capture.”
The story of Zimmerman and Martin took a new twist on Thursday when Zimmerman’s father spoke with the Fox News affiliate in Orlando. According to Robert Zimmerman, his son never made contact with Martin until the latter attacked him and threatened to kill him.
If so, that truth explodes the meme running wild in the media, that Trayvon was merely an innocent boy who was shot because he was “walking while black.”
Lee’s Actions
Yet the near tragedy for septuagenarians David and Elaine McClain did not begin with film director Spike Lee.
Rather, as the online site The Smoking Gun reported, it began with someone named “Marcus Davonne Higgins, a 33-year-old Los Angeles man who uses the online handle ‘maccapone.’”
According to TSG, Higgins “first began disseminating the Sanford address to his Twitter followers last Wednesday [March 21], including the claim that Zimmerman ‘Like the fat punk he is, he still lives at home with mommie & daddy.’”
In a simultaneous post to his Facebook wall, Higgins told his 4000 friends, “FEEL FREE TO REACH OUT & TOUCH HIM.” He also claimed in another post that, “REAL TALK MY PEOPLE OUT THERE IN FLORIDA JUST TOLD ME GEORGE ZIMMERMAN IS NOT AT HIS HOUSE THEY OUT THERE RIGHT NOW.”
Higgins’s dissemination of Zimmerman’s purported Edgewater Circle address was not, however, limited to cyberspace. At a protest rally last Thursday in an L.A. park near his Crenshaw home, Higgins held a sign containing Zimmerman’s name, address, and phone number.
Except, of course, none were accurate.
The cyberspace vigilante thought that Elaine McClain’s son, William George Zimmerman, was the man who shot Trayvon Martin. He was wrong. The man who shot Martin is George M. Zimmerman.
Lee didn’t bother checking up on the amateur gumshoe’s detective work. On March 23, he retweeted the false address to 200,000 followers.
What happened to the McClains? TSG reported that the couple were “‘afraid’ due to the online linking of … [their] address to Zimmerman.”
“We’re keeping everything locked,” she said. McClain added that the couple was particularly unnerved by a letter mailed to them at their home. On the envelope, she said, were printed the words “Taste The Rainbow,” the slogan for Skittles. Martin was carrying a pack of Skittles and a can of ice[d] tea when he was gunned down by Zimmerman.
McClain said her husband returned the envelope unopened to the post office.
Eventually, the McClains left their home.
Not surprisingly, Higgins ducked TSG’s calls for comment.
On Wednesday, Lee apologized: “I deeply apologize to the McClain Family for retweeting their address. It was a mistake. Please leave the McClain’s in peace. Justice in Court.” He also called the couple.
Lee’s settlement with the McClains is undislosed.
Whether there will be “justice in court” remains to be seen. First, police have to determine George Zimmerman committed a crime. Thus far, they have not charged him.
New Black Panthers
While Higgins and Lee were wreaking havoc on the McClains, the New Black Panther Party, most recently famous for getting away with voter intimidation at polling stations in Philadelphia during the 2008 election, announced a $10,000 bounty for the capture of George Zimmerman, although it also published a “Wanted Dead or Alive” poster for him.
According to the Orlando Sentinel, the NBP announced the bounty at one of the many rallies for Trayvon. When a Sentinel reporter asked whether the group was calling for violence, NBP leader Mikhail Muhammed defiantly replied, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”
The Sentinel reported that “Muhammed led the small group in chanting ‘Justice for Trayvon!’ and ‘Black Power!’
“If the government won’t do the job, we’ll do it,” Muhammad said, leading his group of eight party members in chants like “freedom or death” and “justice for Trayvon” while making the iconic gesture of raising their fists into the air.…
As [a police officer at the rally] walked back to his cruiser, Muhammad berated and pointed angrily at him saying “If you’d had shown this much concern, Trayvon may still be alive today.”
The fiery rhetoric and often profanity-laden diatribes made some visitors to the impromptu memorial uncomfortable.
Even the widely discredited leftist Southern Poverty Law Center, which routinely smears conservatives as “racists,” lists the NBP as a hate group.
While Jesse Jackson denounced the NBP, he also threatened more protests if a grand jury does not indict Zimmerman in Martin’s death.
Robert Zimmerman: Trayvon Threatened to Kill My Son
Since the shooting, “civil rights” leaders and leftist radicals have been pushing the media to report that Zimmerman is a racist vigilante who profiled Trayvon Martin and shot him for no reason other than being black.
That meme is best exemplified by the remarks from Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga). Said Johnson, “He was executed for ‘WWB’ in a ‘GC.’ Walking While Black in a Gated Community.”
Johnson is the Congressmen who, during a hearing on Capitol Hill, asked a Navy admiral if the island of Guam would capsize if too many Marines were stationed there.
Details arebeginning to emerge that belie the received narrative. On Thursday, Fox News in Orlando aired its interview with Robert Zimmerman, George’s father. The elder Zimmerman’s tale is rather a different story from the one Martin’s family and Al Sharpton (of the Tawana Brawley hoax and Crown Heights Riot) are pushing.
According to Robert Zimmerman, his son saw Trayvon Martin walking behind town homes in the neighborhood and thought it was suspicious. “[George Zimmerman] called the non-emergency number first, and they asked him where he was, because he was at the rear of the town houses and there was no street sign,” the elder Zimmerman told the Fox affiliate.
Robert Zimmerman said his son pursued Martin so he could pin down an address to give police. “He lost sight of the individual, he continued to walk down the same sidewalk to the next street, so he could get an address for the police,” he said.
He went to the next street, realized where he was and was walking to his vehicle. It’s my understanding, at that point, Trayvon Martin walked up to him and asked him, “Do you have a [expletive] problem?” George said, “No, I don’t have a problem," and started to reach for his cell phone … at that point, he (Martin) was punching him in the nose, his nose was broken and he was knocked to the concrete. Trayvon Martin got on top of him and just started beating him. In the face, in his nose, hitting his head on the concrete.
The reporter asked whether Martin said anything to George Zimmerman.
After nearly a minute of being beaten, George was trying to get his head off the concrete, trying to move with Trayvon on him, into the grass. In doing so, his firearm was shown. Trayvon Martin said something to the effect of, “you’re gonna die now or you’re gonna die tonight,” something to that effect. He continued to beat George, and at some point, George pulled his pistol and did what he did.
The reporter asked whether Trayvon “verbally threatened his life.”
“Yes,” the elder Zimmerman replied.
Robert Zimmerman’s summary of events mirrors the report his son gave to police, and which was reported in the Orlando Sentinel. The Sentinel reported that “much of [George Zimmerman’s account] has been corroborated by witnesses.”
Photo of Spike Lee: AP Images
